What people see in the news are places where things have not going so well.

That is the strength of having a trusting and ongoing relationship that draws on our history and moves right on into our present, and I have that kind of marriage.

I will say that the power of being a stranger in someone else's religious community has its own lessons, really. It is something like the power of visiting another very happy extended family and being at their table.

The journey to sacred places is the most common way that people travel in India. They are always going on pilgrimages to sacred places. They are always undertaking spiritual journeys to visit the great shrines in the Himalayan tier of pilgrimage places; these places are called tirthas, a word that means "crossing place," a place where you can cross the river to the far shore but also cross over into another dimension of life. Cross over to heaven, in one sense it's used.

The idea that the United States government would have to figure out what to do about the headscarf is simply ludicrous. We don't get involved in that.

We tend to gravitate towards our tribes; the challenge is to understand the people of other tribes.

We are built on a structure of the freedom of religion and the non-establishment of religion. That really is a pretty sturdy rudder for the U.S.